git log origin/develop gives "fatal: ambiguous argument"

user_2192903 0
Viewed 753

Context: I am making a tool to analyze differences between 2 branches. I would like to watch the history of commits on origin/develop and origin/release. As I need the history only, I cloned the project with only the history (git clone --bare)

After a git fetch, I would like to see the latest commits on release and develop without having to git merge origin/develop|release on each branch. So I tried to just git log origin/develop [... format options].

On some projects, it works as expected. But on a particular project, I get this error :

$ git log origin/develop                                                                                                                                                                                                                 master * ] 11:01 
fatal: ambiguous argument 'origin/develop': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.
Use '--' to separate paths from revisions, like this:
'git <command> [<revision>...] -- [<file>...]'

If I try git remote -v, I can see that origin is correctly defined. How could origin/develop not be a valid revision?

git-log git
1 Answers

To quote the documentation of the --bare flag:

Also the branch heads at the remote are copied directly to corresponding local branch heads, without mapping them to refs/remotes/origin

This git log option would work if the repository was cloned without the --bare flag.

EDIT: To answer the question in the comments, this also means you can call git log <branchname> directly, without referring to origin/<branchname>. I.e., in your case:

git log develop
user_24227760
Related